What Exactly Does The Title Joker: Folie A Deux Mean?
I'm immediately torn on Joker getting a sequel. Despite all of the meme culture around it and the massive misunderstandings of who and what the film represented, I loved the movie, especially Joaquin Phoenix's Oscar winning portrayal. In a world of constant interconnected universes, it was interesting to see such an iconic comic book character explored in a fresh, grounded way in a standalone story. A sequel doesn't mean the start of the JCU, and will likely remain focused on Joker and his further descent (or would that be ascent?) into madness, but the title gives us a few hints.
Joker: Folie a Deux is the name of Joker 2 and, as all Fall Out Boy fans will know, Folie a Deux means 'madness shared'. There are a number of different interpretations of this on offer. The finale of Joker sees him become a deified figure in the community, as the downtrodden embrace his reckless violence and begin an uprising against the capitalist systems that keep us all underfoot. It represents the ways in which desperate societies can be corrupted by a cult-like figure who allows them to give into their basest instincts, but of course our poor media literacy means a common take away from Joker is that life sucks for men, specifically.
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Director Todd Phillips will be acutely aware of how Joker has been embraced by the exact sort of viewers who were supposed to learn from it, and the 'madness shared' could be more metaphorical, with the movie addressing and focussing on those who unironically saw Joker as a hero character, sticking it to The Man (or The Person In Power Of Unspecified Gender, thanks Woke Police) in this era of MeToo, cancel culture, and Johnny Depp
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